Lecture in Tallinn: Collaboration and Communication: Digital Humanities Research at sotonDH

I am really looking forward to my lecture at the University of Tallinn tomorrow (see abstract below). I just finished the talk. If all goes to plan I am going to start by introducing our Digital Humanities activities at Southampton, and how they are influenced by the sotonDH hub and by other groups such as the DE USRG and the Web Science DTC. Hopefully I will have time to mention some of the work by our PhD students bridging the gaps here, like that of Nicole Beale (social media and museums practice) and Terhi Nurmikko (cuneiform and the semantic web). Having mentioned some other projects like GAP, Discover Medieval Chester, the Soldier in Medieval England, MusicSpace and LANG-SNAP. I am going to concentrate on aspects of visualisation and auralisation research: a section on computed tomography of musical instruments and coins, the PianoHAWK project and the RTISAD imaging project. I will end this section by discussing work to use RTI as part of the recording and visualisation process at Catalhoyuk. Section three is focused on collaboration. It begins with some of our interests at Southampton in social media and scholarly discourse. I will mention the SMiLE project and work within the WS DTC, and also the twitter archiving work underway, including social network analysis and new work connecting related tweets across our research social media archives. For example, linking tweets from different events that either explicitly or implicitly are associated.

It then introduces the PATINA project as a means to bridge these digital research practices with the physical research environment – aligned in part to other projects such as SmartSpaces. Finally I will talk briefly about how we communicate the complex research activities evidenced in digital humanities research, with an emphasis on constructing digital narratives through tools such as Microsoft Research’s RIN tool and through use of different interactive environments, such as our multitouch learning environment. Lots to cover so I hope I can make some sense of it on the day :-)

Abstract:

In this talk Graeme Earl (University of Southampton) will talk about the Digital Humanities activities at the University of Southampton, focused around the sotonDH hub. Ongoing research at Southampton focuses on ways of communicating complex ideas and data sets to a wide audience, including the public and multi-disciplinary researchers, and also on means to improve collaboration within and across domains including recent work on scholarly communications. Amongst the projects discussed will be work to use linked data in the characterisation of ancient cuneiform texts and documentation of Classical sources, and the application of human computer interaction principles to encourage collaborative research in the home, archive and in the field. It will also introduce a range of imaging, auralisation and visualisation projects at Southampton including applications in music and archaeology.